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SEO Optimization Tips for WordPress

SEO Optimization Tips for WordPress

When it comes to setting up a blog or a WordPress website, SEO Experts and many smaller businesses choose to go with WordPress. WordPress is popular due to its flexibility as well as ease-of-use. How popular exactly? WordPress is downloaded roughly one million times every two days, is used for 1,420,000 new posts every day and runs an estimated 4.5 percent of the entire Internet. Those are incredibly numbers. However, just because it’s immensely popular and highly regarded does not mean that you are using it properly. One of the biggest mistakes that new bloggers and marketers make is to assume that optimizing their WordPress site is as easy as throwing in a couple of tags and making sure their keywords show up within their text. You’re not going to get very far if this is all you’re doing.

The following are 7 SEO Optimization Tips for WordPress website/blog:

Provide a Sitemap

Your website needs to have a sitemap for one simple reason – providing one will help Google’s bots to crawl your website in a more intelligent manner. Basically, the sitemap will list all of your website’s URLs as well as the last date each page was modified, how often each page is changed and which pages should be prioritized. The more easily that Google can crawl your website, the better it will index your content. You can use certain Sitemap plugins for WordPress sites to automatically generate your sitemap, such as XML-Sitemap generators. Just keep in mind that your site can’t consist of more than 500 pages and also uses the same change frequency for every URL, which isn’t ideal if you add new content more than once a week since this means that you’ll want some pages crawled more frequently than others.

Adding internal links to all of your website’s pages will do a number of things for you. First of all, it’ll help keep visitors on your website for a longer period of time, which will affect your website’s dwell time, which in turn helps to improve your ranking. Secondly, internal links make it easier for search engines to categorize your website. They’ll be able to compare several webpages in order to find a common theme instead of having to draw conclusions from just one page.

Make Sure External Links Are Relevant

Like your internal links, Google will use your external links as a way to determine what your page is about in order to better categorize your content. Google will compare your site to those that you are linking to in search of common themes, so make sure that the links you provide are relevant. Keep in mind, you want to provide your readers with relevant links anyway since you want to be providing them with additional value.

Fill in Your Alt Tags and Titles for Your Images

As you probably know by now, using images is not only a great way to break up your text, it’s also a great way to draw the attention of your reader and by making it easier for readers to understand what your content is about at a glance. However, unlike your readers, Google isn’t able to identify visual content – it needs textual context. This means that you need to provide relevant descriptions using keywords for your Alt tags and titles of your images in order to tell Google what they are about.

Don’t Over Optimize Using Your Keywords

Hopefully, you know this one already. Back in the day, many bloggers and marketers would participate in a practice known as “keyword stuffing.” This involved using their keywords more than necessary in order to trick Google into ranking them highly. Google has counteracted this practice with a more intelligent algorithm that can identify keyword stuffing. This means that you need to be careful about using your keywords too often since you can be punished for doing so. Even though you may be aware of this, it’s worth mentioning again just because of how important it is to keep in mind when you are optimizing your WordPress site.

Use Relevant Headers

Your H1, H2 and H3 tags help to break up your content so that readers aren’t facing an overwhelming wall of text. They also help make it easy for readers to get a gist of what your content is about with just a glance. Search engines use headers to get a gist of what your content is about as well, so make sure that you craft headers that are relevant and keyword rich.

If you haven’t signed up to Google+ yet, it’s highly recommended that you do so. This will let you take advantage of a feature known as Google Authorship. You’ll be able to use Google Authorship for all of your content, including the posts you publish on your WordPress site. Authorship let’s you add a name and picture, thereby providing an identity behind your blog. This is incredibly useful as Google will index content that makes use of Google Authorship much more quickly, not to mention that it will help you build credibility throughout the web, thereby boosting brand awareness.

WordPress is an excellent platform for launching your company blog. However, you need to make sure that you optimize your WordPress site properly in order for it to be effective. Be sure to use these seven SEO tips in order to make sure your WordPress site is fully optimized for SEO.